NUMSA supports the SACP’s Red October Campaign

The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) supports the annual Red October campaign as led by our vanguard party of the working class and insurance guarantor of a Socialist South Africa, the South African Communist Party (SACP).

This Red October campaign comes at a very critical phase or moment of our revolution. The country has witnessed titanic battles waged by workers for a living wage, periodic and popular service delivery protests in mainly working class communities, the collapse of the culture of learning and teaching in the Eastern Cape, and the rotten corruption in State’s tendering processes. All these have a potential to plunge our country into a social crisis and render it into a predatory state.

This year’s Red October campaign which we support fully will be rallying the workers and the poor around the following struggles and demands:

Building Working Class Power in our Communities for;

a. People’s education for people’s power

b. Land and food for all

c. Building a people’s economy: through cooperatives and a cooperative banks’ movement

d. Building a rural motive force: by establishing and consolidating a strong rural women’s movement

e. Fight corruption

These demands and struggles by the vanguard party should not be de-linked from the broader class struggles waged by workers for a Living Wage as led by organised section of the working class and a reliable ally of our vanguard, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).

This Red October Campaign as led by the SACP provides an opportunity for the two working class formations to consolidate unity amongst the working class formations, and secondly to mobilise the working as a social force to reverse the barbarity and social ills imposed on our people by the crisis-ridden Capitalist system.

This Red October campaign should be used to raise high levels of class consciousness amongst the working class, rural peasantry, youth and revolutionary intelligentsia to contest the dominance and hegemony in all key sites of power in the interest of the working class and the poor.

This Red October campaign should also to be used to demand a New Economic Growth Path (NGP) that puts the country into a new economic trajectory and makes a decisive shift from the neo-liberal and accumulation policies entrenched and fostered by the 1996 class project over the past 15 years of our nascent democratic dispensation. The crisis of unemployment, poverty and deepening mass inequalities are a manifestation of the failures of the neo-liberal.